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Comment by grimtrigger | Hacker News Reader

Ugh I really hate articles like this.

For one it asserts that we should have an issue with others getting rich. Even if the net gain for society is 0, what is the problem with other people getting rich? Does it impoverish you in any way? Maybe you could make a case for price rises hurting the poor - but the author doesn't mention it and I don't think that's his/her angle.

There's also an incredible elitism about what a company "should" be.

> Are our kids going to say we boldly explored the range of human possibility by putting a million dollars into a mobile app that sends a pointless text message saying “Yo”?

Guess what? People like emojis and filters and flappy bird. The author doesn't have a problem with the "startup scene", he/she has a problem with humanity.

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If we gave everyone a billion dollars except you, does it impoverish you in anyway? I think so.

I wrote this article because the tech scene is so disconnected from where it started.

Does every startup have to be immediately beneficial to the consumer? What if someone like Procter & Gamble has a bigger R&D budget to dedicate to some miracle spray like Febreze only after they've switched to something like cloud-based vendor billing, which allowed them to save a lot?

Is cloud-based vendor billing society-changing? Probably not. Do they help out older companies and new startups entering the field by taking care of something nobody wanted to focus on? Probably yes.

How so, exactly? By having less money than others? Millionaires are impoverished if you equate it with inequality.

This is actually one of those catch 22's of wealth: if you're in the 50% you probably feel better about your money than you do if you're in the 2% or -- even worse -- the bottom of the 1%. The reason is that the 49% is almost exactly like you. They make a few bucks more than you do but it's not meaningful (i.e. you both have exactly the same standard of living). Now, if you belong to the 2%, you are an order of magnitude "poorer" than the 1%. If you just made it to the 1%, you are a couple of orders of magnitude "poorer" than the 0.1%. And, those differences are meaningful.

It's really one of the sadder aspects of human nature. No one can just enjoy how good they have it. We always have to grade ourselves on a curve. Shit, if I compare my life to Rockefeller or JP Morgan, I have it so much better in so many ways. But, no one over feels bad for Rockefeller because that sucker lived before the internet.

Inflation.

It all started with Shockly (sp?) & Co. building better bombs. The first disruption was putting the transistor in something as stupid as a radio. Seems to me that society's always been more interested in the stupid consumer application of impressive technology.

Radios are "stupid"?

I can assure you that people who lived in remote areas found radios that could run off batteries for extended periods very useful indeed (for that matter, people who live in remote areas now find them useful).

Yes, through inflation. But your article never mentions that.

If you mentioned inflation, someone would point that inflation has been very low for the past few years.

The author doesn't have any problems. He just simply believes in Social Entrepreneurship and is expressing his point of view, which doesn't have to be "right".

I don't see that the author has an issue with other people getting rich, rather the repeated enriching by cynical projects that exist purely for the exit. It's the philosophical divide between the US and EU, which seem to be butting heads more often and louder.

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